The Muzzle to Counter-Theological Voices
The question then becomes: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. (Foucault 221)
Michel Foucault describes the author as puppeteering a transcendent “creator” in mass culture—an ideological muzzle to the chaotic proliferation of meaning left in their absence. Without the author’s existence, the “great danger” of fiction escapes and any dominant culture that controls it collapses. The dominant culture fears this for it controls through the author, the “principle of thrift.” We see the author above “all other men,” as a singular creator, and therefore we can choose to participate or ignore that author’s singularity—their work. This singularity ultimately stifles the extension of that ‘author’s’ text into the world as it is a mere “deposit,” an “inexhaustible world of significations” no less but one that can be uttered or left unheard. This is why Roland Barthes calls the “counter-theological” the “properly revolutionary”: We must refuse the “God” status of culture and text to dismantle the dominant culture (Barthes 5). Raymond Williams does this in his Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory by both detaching and attaching himself to Marxist discourse: Williams qualifies the process of social being determining consciousness, Lukàcs’s idea of totality, Gramsci’s notions of hegemony, and the inseparable nature of culture and literature. In doing so, he and Foucault begin to expose the perception of the dominant culture as a faux-theological curator who—both through authors and like an author—limits the preexisting impersonality of endless, liberating text and meaning.
Williams first qualifies the Marxist understanding of how “social being determines consciousness,” the basis of the relationship between base and superstructure, to display how the dominant culture maintains its theological guise, masking the individual’s participation in its exaltation (Williams 3). Williams notes, however, that there are two senses of the word determination: The controlling of a subsequent activity, and the setting of limits and exerting of pressures. Although “Marx’s own proposition explicitly denies this,” the conventional Marxist notion has become the former, a kind of prefiguration that was “inherited from idealist and theological accounts of the world and man” (Williams 4). However, this model of determination as “an external cause which totally predicts” falsely clothes the process as outside of the individual’s discretion, thereby obscuring any potential analysis of determination at the individual level (Williams 3). This echoes Foucault’s assessment of the reader in projecting the author—the author becomes the “projection” of the “operations we force texts to undergo,” such as connections, “continuities,” characteristics, and omissions that have been established as pertinent or necessary in reading (Foucault 213). Similarly, Williams sees the dominant culture as the projection of the individual, consciously or unconsciously, by the latter process of “setting limits, exerting pressures” in the individual’s consumption of culture (4). Although this would suggest both the reader and the consumer of culture (who are eventually one and the same) are the creators of the theological overhang, it is done by a dominant culture’s process of hiding the individual’s stake in this exaltation. In this sense, the shaping of the dominant culture is a curated process of the individual’s unknowing self-determination. Williams, along with Foucault, thus place the “origin of determination in men’s own activities,” dismantling the dominant culture’s theological connotation to better understand its economic interests, its limits and pressures, which constantly sway the participation of the individual in its preservation (Williams 4).
Williams reluctantly attaches to Marxist thought in his reflection of Lukàcs’s idea of totality, denouncing it as a reductive, unstratified model whose aggregation of everything cultural, similar to a transcendental higher power, impedes dissection of the dominant and effective culture. Lukàcs’s addition to the Marxist discourse is one that Williams sees as an unexpected result of “the crudeness of the base/superstructure model” (Williams 7). While Williams is critiquing the Marxist model, he nevertheless sees it as the more viable counterpart to Lukàcs’s. This is because the model of totality is without the account of “intention”—simply an impenetrable mesh of combined culture (Williams 7). Although it is true that society is a “complex whole of such practices,” the whole is directly related to the “intentions which in all our experience have been the rule of a particular class” (Williams 7). Foucault finds a similar connotation of the incomprehensible in the image of the author. This image “transposes the empirical characteristics” of the author, in Foucaults’ case, and the dominant culture, in Williams’s, into a “transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 208). The empirical element for Williams is the observable and intentional superstructural, but that layer is hidden in Lukàcs’s model and without it “we fail to recognize reality at all” (Williams 7). The deified author and the model of totality are similar in this case as both see intention outside of the human purview. The “theological affirmation of [the] sacred character” in both is what disguises them as “inalterable” forces that must be left to be (Foucault 208). Williams confirms this by emphasizing how it is the constant fight to understand the determination of the superstructural— to bridge the gap between comprehensible and transcendental—and their claims of “universal validity or legitimacy” that allows one to challenge the rule of the dominating class. Without this, as in Lukàcs’s model, the “class character of society can no longer be seen” (Williams 7). While one might argue that the author or the dominant culture, by transcending into totality’s anonymity, are entering the sought after realm of textual impersonality that Barthes stresses, and Foucault considers, Foucault amends this by noting that the author rather becomes the “guise of an enigma” (Foucault 213). Thus, totality actually transfigures anonymity to enigma, where all the theological connotations of a higher power—now merely unnamed—still exist. Lukàcs’s social totality then is a theologically centered model that Williams denounces as a deflection from any considerable progress in dismantling the dominant class and culture.
Unlike Lukàcs’s model of totality, Gramsci’s idea of ‘hegemony’ in Marxist discourse is one that Williams attaches to; however, he modifies its social apparatus to be a selective curation of cultural assets rather than an abstract imposed ideology, dissolving its uniform and theological undertones. Gramsci’s contribution to the Marxist discourse, the implication of hegemony in society—a dominance of one social group over others—resolves Lukàcs’s exemption of intentionality and makes the totality of society comprehensible. However, it is the fixedness with which many in the Marxist discourse associate hegemony with that Williams takes issue with, a fixedness that Foucault sees in the author being defined “as a constant level of value” and coherence (214). Williams fears that the idea of hegemony is regressing to the “relatively simple, uniform and static notion which ‘superstructure’ in ordinary use had become” (Williams 8). He amends this conventional view of hegemony by adding that it must be a continual, complex, and dynamic process where the ruling class’s filtration of culture is “continually to be renewed, recreated, and defended” (Williams 8). This active reformation of the dominant culture’s curated meanings and practices in society is, however, not a looming, abstract ideology or transcendental theological phenomenon. Instead, as Williams coins, it is a “selective tradition,” where the capacity to choose or exclude certain cultural assets is passed from one dominant culture to the next “but always the selectivity is the point” (Williams 9). However, how such selectivity is metamorphosed into something as inexplicable as God’s will or the like—an abstract all-encompassing ideology—is something Foucault speaks to. He notes how the concept of an author’s work—or “oeuvre”—is a means to compartmentalize the complete ideas of multiple texts into a “unity that designates” (Foucault 207, 208). This unity is a component of the author’s larger image, one that it must be consistent with since the author is ultimately an “ideological figure,” according to Foucault (222). Therefore, it is by way of the categories of author and work and their aforementioned singularity by which Williams’s concept of a hegemonic selectivity can play the invisible hand of dominant culture. By actively selecting certain cultural assets—including authors or discourses in society which appeal to the author function—the hand can appear as an abstract imposed ideology, a theologized view of hegemony that Williams sees both as a deception and an obstacle to dismantling the dominant culture’s self-renewing process.
By Williams qualifying the Marxist literary tradition in a capitalist society, along with Foucault’s detailing of the transgressive quality of writing and discourse, it is revealed how this self-renewing dominant culture is a means to quell the inevitable excess of alternative realities and bottle the chaotic impersonal into a manageable industry of property. Although Williams explicates how the dominant culture represses and controls the free flow of culture, he offers the exemption that no “mode of production” or “dominant society” ever truly exhausts “human practice, human energy, human intention” (Williams 11). It is inevitable, therefore, for there to exist alternative realities in the visible field of culture. Williams, as a Marxist, sees literature as an “important activity” for investigating these alternate “areas where different versions of practice” and meaning are expressed. Nevertheless, he realizes how the role of literature in a capitalist society has become incorporated into the economic funnel of profit-making (Williams 11). Because of this, “most writing” has become a “contribution to the effective dominant culture” (12-13). In fact, literature’s “capacity to embody and enact” meaning and to relay general truths enable the dominant culture to more easily articulate its extensions into society (Williams 13). How literature, as a “circulation […] of certain discourses”, has this power is explained by Foucault who sees it as a remnant of the “bipolar field of the sacred and profane” (212). The antiquated binary of viewing literature as for or against theology granted it this dangerous reputation that had to be managed by a system of property that has “compensated” the author for entering the “field of discourse” (213). This attribution of the inexhaustible realms of literature into property thereby contain them and impede the revolutionary potential of discourse which, by way of an authored personality, can be dismissed or excluded by the dominant culture. Williams and Barthes see this as the very method that hijacks any revolutionary potential of a particular text as the dominant culture will merely reconstruct its list of barred discourses and texts. Therefore, Barthes’s “preexisting impersonality”—the realm where one cannot “separate out” one text or cultural asset from the “formed body” of another—will always be partitioned and bottled in the castrating property of the author (Barthes 2, Williams 13). This relationship between this selective dominant culture and literature is therefore not mere simile but the endlessly shifting muzzle of property that silences textual voices blacklisted from the dominant and effective culture in any given moment.
Williams detaches and attaches himself to numerous different aspects of conventional Marxist discourse, but always qualifies and adds to its addendum of dissecting the dominant and effective culture. In analyzing the process of social being determining consciousness, deconstructing the incomprehensibility Lukàcs’s model of totality, qualifying hegemony’s preservation as a constant selection of culture, and delving into the self-reciprocating relationship between the dominant culture and literature, Williams alongside Foucault has revealed how the theological and abstract connotations of the dominant class’s puppeteering of culture are mere deceptions and deflections from its silencing of potentially revolutionary voices. Despite the seemingly different roles of the dominant class and the concept of the author, it is through Foucault that Williams’s modifications to Marxist discourse can explain how both are a “regulator of the fictive” and a neuter to that portal, that realm of the impersonality—where the free flow of text and culture exists (Foucault 222). The dominant culture exploits the figuration of the author as both model and tool to play the invisible hand that muzzles the many counter-voices that so desperately need to be heard.
